


A Trip to the Comic Convention

by imkerfuffled



Series: Lucia Castillo, Helper of Superheroes [4]
Category: DCU (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Conventions, F/M, not really a dc crossover. i only mention it because the comics are referenced a lot, rating for strong and sometimes offensive language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 17:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5299271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adrian is too old for superheroes anymore, a fact his little sister, Lucia, won't stop pestering him about, so when  he gets roped into driving Lucia and her friend to a comic convention, he expects to spend the whole day bored out of his mind. Things don't turn out exactly as he planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Trip to the Comic Convention

**Author's Note:**

> As always, the inspiration for this came from stephaniegk, so thank you so much! 
> 
> I realized as I was writing this that I have next to no clue what an actual, honest to God, comic con looks like. I've been to something similar with my friends, but a) that was an anime convention, b) it happened years ago, and c) I was not even remotely into anime back then (long story), so I didn't actually pay much attention to what went on.  
> So I modeled this con after what I remember from that one and wrote it from Adrian's perspective. Plus, he was clearly still a closet geek, so I decided he deserved a break anyway.
> 
> Also, warning for all sorts of offensive language from the guy named Chase, who shall henceforth be known as Jackass Supreme. 
> 
> Try to guess what the different cosplay pictures are!
> 
> Edit: I am so sorry, and also an idiot. In a major Fake Geek Girl moment, I completely misspelled the name of Princess Leia Organa, queen of my heart and also the galaxy, and I apologize. I wrote this before I got back into Star Wars Hell, and I forgot to check the spelling like I'd planned to do. Every mention of "Princess Leah" in here sends a dagger through my heart, and I have rectified my inexcusable error.

When Lucia began lamenting at the dinner table one day about how little use her Blackhawk costume would get now that Halloween was over, her parents assumed the worst. Ever since she announced her plans to make the semi-original superhero costume, Mr. and Mrs. Castillo had been on high alert, looking for any signs that she still considered ‘teen hero’ a viable career choice for a girl not even halfway through puberty. Most parents wouldn’t consider that a serious issue, but most parents didn’t have to raise Lucia.

Lucia continued her poorly-acted performance, oblivious to the panicked silence from her parents as they engaged in an argument using only their eyebrows. Adrian, for his part, tried to hide behind his egg rolls. It couldn’t be more obvious that Lucia wanted something, and if their parents were even a tiny bit correct about what that was, it would probably be best for Adrian to have a quick escape plan.

As it turned out, nobody was right; Lucia wanted to go to a convention with Julie.

Their parents were so relieved that she hadn’t announced she was forming the Young Super Geeks Squad (or something or other) that they nearly immediately said, “We’ll consider it,”In an instant, Lucia rushed off to get her laptop and show which con she and Julie had in mind. 

Soon, “We’ll consider it,” turned into, “Here’s some ground rules.” First, they’d have to get the Rodriguez parents on board as well, which Lucia suggested (as per Julie’s strategy) could wait a day, so that Lucia’s parents would be able to explain everything in detail. Assuming that worked out, Lucia would have to get good grades for the rest of the semester, stay on her best behavior, and provide her own money for anything extra she wanted to buy at the convention. Luckily, she and Julie had already raised a hundred and twenty dollars through Julie’s babysitting, Lucia’s allowance, and their illegal baked goods sales at school, which curiously enough happened to be the exact cost of two tickets.

Then came the bad news.

Lucia’s convention was still three months away, but already her parents found an issue with scheduling. Mr. Castillo had to work that weekend, and Mrs. Castillo would be in Boston for a conference, so the girls had no way of getting halfway across the state to the hotel hosting the convention (essentially a cheaper, off-brand Comic-Con). Five minutes of Lucia’s frantic pleading later, they came to a concession:

Adrian could drive them. And since Julie’s parents would never consent to their daughter going more than ten miles from home without some form of chaperone, Adrian would also have to stay with them the entire time.

No amount of pleading on Adrian’s part changed that.

 

 

A couple weeks later, Adrian picked his phone off the bench at baseball practice to find a text from Lucia waiting for him: “its official; mom just bought the tickets. ur stuck with us now :D :D”

Adrian groaned and swore under his breath, catching the attention of the blond haired senior next to him, dripping just as much sweat as Adrian. “What’s the problem?” the boy asked.

“Oh, uh…” Adrian hesitated, strangely reluctant to answer. Then he scoffed and rolled his eyes, “My parents are forcing me miss practice to go babysit my little sister at this stupid geek thing of hers.”

The boy, Chase, pulled a face, “You think that’s bad, try putting up with a girlfriend who’s into that kinda shit. Do you know how hard it is to pretend to like those retarded Asian cartoons?” He plopped himself on the bench and started retying his shoelaces, while Adrian took a gulp of water. “But, hey, at least she’s hot.”

“Yeah…” Adrian knew for a fact that Chase’s girlfriend had wanted to break up with him since homecoming, but he decided now would be a bad time to mention that.

The coach’s whistle screamed for everyone to get back on the field, and Chase jumped up, clapping Adrian on the back as they jogged to their places. “Man, I am so glad you got over all that. You were the gayest kid on the whole team when you joined.”

“Hey, shut up, everyone regrets who they were in middle school.”

If Adrian’s laugh sounded a bit insincere, he just blamed it on the exhausting practice.

 

 

* * *

 

**Three months, another fifty dollars’ worth of illegal cupcakes, and one more intricately designed cosplay later:**

 

Adrian stood in the long line to enter the convention, trying not to contract any of Lucia and Julie’s infectious enthusiasm. They had practically dragged him out of the parking garage the moment he stopped the car, giving hardly enough time to text everyone’s parents that they’d arrived safely before tugging him down the street by his jacket. On the drive there, he had worried about not being able to find the hotel, but that turned out to be the easiest part of navigating; he just followed the stream of cosplayers heading in the same direction. Rather, Julie and Lucia followed the stream of cosplayers; Adrian tried not to trip in their wake.

The two girls bounced impatiently next to him, babbling together about every new cosplay they saw. Adrian forced himself not to look whenever they found someone he recognized, and instead focused on the group of gray-skinned people in front of him with strangely shaped horns, who, according to Julie were Homestuck trolls.

Adrian decided they sounded dumb. Julie agreed, but she was grinning when she said it, so Adrian wasn’t sure if he believed her. Then again, he figured nothing short of the words “the convention is cancelled,” could make her and Lucia stop grinning just then.

In the spirit of Lucia’s Blackhawk cosplay, Julie had designed a Robin/Batgirl fusion for the convention using the basic New 52 Batgirl costume and Robin’s color scheme (called Batrobin, Robatgirl, or baby Dickbabs depending on her mood). In the process of its creation, Adrian had written down some of her more impressive swears to remember while she tried to get all the fiddly snaps and pouches to work. Lucia’s costume also got a makeover, by fixing the holsters, replacing the gauntlets with more accurate homemade ones, and spray painting all the weapons metallic purples to better match the colors, as well as updating the wig to match the Black Widow's current style.

Their work paid off. Already, five people had come up to take pictures of their cosplays, and two had commented on the combination of real Marvel heroes with fictional DC characters, to which Adrian couldn’t resist saying, “It’s like mixing Star Wars and Star Trek.”

Lucia decided her next project would be a Starfleet Princess Leia.

What felt like hours later, they reached the door and exchanged their tickets for day passes, maps, and itineraries, and got shunted into the weapons check line, where Lucia and Julie had to confirm how fake their fake weapons were. By the time they got through the whole process, Adrian already wanted to go home, and the girls couldn’t be more eager to get out on the convention floor. They kept pointing at various events on the itinerary and jumping up and down, and Adrian had to grab Lucia by the quiver strap to keep her from running off to meet another Black Widow cosplayer that they saw by the row of escalators in the back.

The hotel was arranged so that the lobby took up most of the ground floor, with the reception area—converted into the check in stations for the convention—in the front, opening up into a wide circular space. A sunken dais in the center housed a main food bar, and above it the ceiling reached all the way up ten stories to a skylight in the roof, with the bulk of the hotel wrapped around that virtual pillar of space. Anyone staying the full three days of the convention could reserve a hotel room on one of those upper floors. On the ground floor, in the place of hotel rooms, were a number of small stores and gift shops, with tables and chairs dotting the space between them and the food bar. Under normal circumstances it would probably be quite spacious, but now, with hundreds of excited, costumed fans filling every inch of it, Adrian just felt cramped.

Before they could run off, he dragged Lucia and Julie off to the side, between a café and a gift shop that had been converted into selling comics.

“Look, you know the rules,” he told them, “Stay away from creepy people, keep your phones on at all times—”

Julie and Lucia held up their phones.

“—save enough money for food, and if anyone tries anything funny, shoot them where it really hurts.”

Lucia touched a finger to the one modified, no-longer-felt-tipped arrow in her quiver and grinned wickedly.

“I’ll be right here if you need anything, and make sure to check in every hour or so,” he finished, “Or at least text. Got it?”

They nodded in a way highly reminiscent of bobble heads.

“Good. Now go!” Before he could even finish the sentence, they had already shot off like a pair of rockets in the direction of the escalators, either heading upstairs, where all the panels were held, or downstairs to the basement, where most of the merchandise booths were.

Adrian sighed and sat down at a small table near the wall, gearing himself up for a long day of doing absolutely nothing in a place that looked like his eighth grade room posters had bred and birthed embarrassing, nightmare babies in it. He plugged his phone into an outlet in the wall and got started.

Within a single hour, the internet ran out of interesting cat videos, he finished what little homework he could do on his phone, and all his iTunes music started to sound the same. He was, without a doubt, bored. Lucia texted a picture of her and Julie with a large woman the color of cotton candy wearing a matching curly wig nearly larger than herself, and Adrian entertained himself for a few minutes trying to guess what she was from. Before long, he gave up and went back to pretending to be busy with his phone, while really he wracked his brains for something to do.

Every time he allowed his eyes to wander around the convention floor, the last, tiny remnant of his eighth grade self couldn’t help but notice how few superhero cosplays he saw there. He had been to one convention like this with a group of his old friends—before he moved into high school, with all its new people and new friends (friend, singular) who scoffed at anything resembling geekiness. They had been Lucia’s age at the time, and with the world riding the crest of its biggest superhero craze ever, they couldn’t take two steps without running into a Captain America, or Iron Man, or Thor. But now…

Now, Adrian counted more of those weird, gray skinned trolls in a single group than he did Avengers on the entire floor.

There were still a number of Batmen, and Supermen, and assorted DC villains scattered around the place, but as fictional characters, they had one considerable advantage over the real deal; their screw-ups couldn’t affect anybody outside of comic books. In dire cases they could even be retconned, or simply ignored.

Sokovia, London, Washington… Those were things that couldn’t be ignored, and couldn’t be retconned into nonexistence. And the people needed someone to blame.

So they blamed the heroes. Even long after he stopped keeping up with superhero news, he still thought that seemed unfair.

The arrival of Lucia’s next text startled him out of his reverie. This time it was of her and Julie with a group of what looked like generic steampunk people carrying stuffed giraffes. He didn’t even try to guess what they were supposed to be. Instead, Adrian stuffed his phone in his pocket and stood up, stretching out the cricks in his back. He bought a quick coffee and muffin from the café behind him, before wandering aimlessly around the floor. One group of cheap dinosaurs and a guy dressed as Chris Pratt asked if he was supposed to be a young John Winchester--whoever that was--and in his shock at actually being asked a question, he accidentally answered yes. They took a picture.

By the time he circled back around to his table, it had been taken by a group of guys playing an intense game of Mario Cart on the DS. Adrian stood there for a second, looking hopelessly at his seat, with his phone charger still dangling from the outlet. He sighed, retrieved the charger, and set out to find a new place to sit.

As he turned to leave, his eyes fell, as they had many times before, on the tiny little comic store to the left of the group of gamers. He got the feeling it was mocking him with the way it seemed to draw his attention so often.

He definitely didn’t want to go in there. Not even a tiny bit.

Nope, not him. Not Adrian Castillo, star pitcher on his baseball team. He was only here because his little sister made him come.

He went a few more rounds around the food bar before he gave in.

The tiny shop couldn’t shake that tacky, hotel gift shop feel, despite all of its knickknacks and t-shirts being replaced with racks and racks of comic books, but the moment Adrian stepped through the door, he was hit with a guilty wave of nostalgia strong enough to nearly stop him in his tracks. He found himself walking through the store as if in a daze, his fingers running lightly across the tops of volumes.

Suddenly, he was reminded of how one girl in his English class had described bookstores: like walking into a building you’d never been in before and thinking, “This is home,” because all your favorite people who you hadn’t seen in years were there waiting for you. At the time, Adrian had thought she was crazy…

No. He refused to be sucked back into this stupid, childish fantasy world. Not after he spent so much time and effort pulling himself out of it the last time. Chase would never take him seriously again. No.

Almost unbidden, his feet had taken him right to the display of recent single issues and paused directly in front of one issue in particular, with its new, blocky silver logo at the top proclaiming _Captain America_ in big, bold letters.

 _No. No no no. Don’t do it,_ he thought, even as a part of him decided he liked the old, red-white-and-blue logo better.

_Too late._

He reached out and grabbed it, sneaking glances around the rest of the store as if afraid someone here, at a damn nerd convention, would judge him. Or worse, he’d see someone he knew.

Adrian stood there, holding the comic in front of him with both hands, as a raging battle waged in his head.

 _One can’t hurt,_ thought one part of his brain, _I’ll just take a peek. It’s not like I’m buying an entire series. Besides, I’m stuck here. Might as well laugh at how dumb these things really were._

 _You’re a fucking idiot,_ thought another part of his brain.

He gave in and slowly lowered himself to the floor, right there in the middle of the store, opening the pages of the comic and breathing in that familiar smell of freshly printed ink. The issue he picked up was the fifth in a six part arc, but he read it anyway, gobbling up the characters even though the plot made no sense. He turned the pages slowly, taking in each panel individually, instead of all at once like he used to. From what he could gather, Captain America seemed to have teamed up with Black Widow and some guy called Falcon to search for the Winter Soldier.

“You know, usually when I see that face it’s on old guys looking through the silver aged comics.”

Adrian nearly jumped out of his skin at hearing the unexpected voice. His head jerked up to see an attractive teenaged girl leaning against the edge of the shelf. Her dark, spiky long hair was streaked with crimson, and she wore thick, plastic framed glasses and a lopsided smirk. A nametag that read “Jackie” was pinned to her employee-issue blue polo.

“Uhhh…” Adrian said eloquently.

“That face,” she said again, pointing at him, “The nostalgic face old guys get when they talk about the good old days, when guys wore short shorts, description boxes ran wild, and people thought “The Whizzer” was a good name for a superhero.”

“Oh, um… Sorry.”

“What’s there to apologize for? Old comics are great,” she shrugged, “Did you know you’ve been sitting there for half an hour?”

“What?” Adrian scrambled to his feet and checked the time on his phone. Sure enough, he’d wasted nearly thirty minutes in the store, and there was a text waiting for him of Lucia and Julie posing with a Deadpool cosplayer.

“Yeah, I was starting to wonder if you’d passed out on me,” Jackie said, “That would’ve been a hassle to deal with.”

“Sorry.”

She shrugged again, “Normally, I’m not allowed to let people read entire comics in the store, but you looked kinda lost.”

Adrian scratched his ear in embarrassment, trying not to squirm. Or run out of the store.

“So, are you gonna buy that or not?”

He looked down at the comic in his hand, feeling strangely hesitant to put it back on the shelf, but, with a sigh, he did. “No, I’m not actually into comic books, and superheroes, and stuff.”

She raised her eyebrows and gave Adrian a piercingly incredulous stare. “Could’ve fooled me,” she said.

“Erm, yeah,” he scratched his ear again, “I really don’t—I mean, I used to, but—”

“Get the comic,” she practically ordered him, “Have you read the rest of that arc?”

Adrian shook his head.

“Get those too.” Jackie rummaged through the shelf, plucking out the first four issues. She slapped them and the one Adrian had just put up into his hands. “What else do you like?”

“I don’t—”

“What else do you like?”

“Mostly Captain America,” Adrian spluttered, “Some Iron Man. And, um, The Flash too.” He was left standing alone by the shelf as Jackie marched off to find more comics for him.

“Here, try these,” she came back wielding another armful of comics, which she plopped on top of his others. “You got enough money for them?”

“I think?”

“Great,” she walked him up to the counter and circled around to the other side, standing behind the counter with an expectant look on her face, waiting for Adrian to set down his pile of comics.

He did, responding more to her commanding tone than to any conscious thought of his own. He fumbled for money in his wallet while Jackie rang up his purchases, and before long she was handing him a plastic bag with a cheerful smile on her face.

“Um… thanks,” he said, taking the bag.

“You’re welcome.”

He left the store feeling like someone had taken an eggbeater to his brain and mashed it into one big soup. The Mario Cart gamers were still sitting at his table, so he wandered over to an unoccupied one nearby and sat down, dropping the bag in front of him.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked it.

It didn’t reply, but it did seem to stare him down. He glared back at it.

Five minutes later, he hesitantly reached into the bag and pulled out the first issue of the Captain America arc.

“This doesn’t mean I care,” he told it, “It just means I’m bored out of my mind.”

With that in mind, he opened it up and began reading… and reading, and reading.

 

 

* * *

 

**Two hours, a lunch, and eight comic books later:**

 

Adrian peeked around the door of the shop, sheepishly adjusting the bag on his shoulder. A man in a generic-looking suit glanced up at him from his perusal of the Captain America section, but the girl behind the counter continued sorting comics. Adrian took a few tentative steps into the store and nearly tripped over the doorstop.

“Oh, hey, it’s you,” Jackie said, reacting to the noise.

“Er… hi,” Adrian said shyly as he straightened up. His hand automatically reached up to scratch his ear, and he yanked it down again. “I was wondering if you, um, had any more recommendations? I kinda ran out of these.” He shrugged his bag further up his shoulder, silently cursing how quickly he could feel the heat rising in his cheeks.

Jackie set her box of comics down on the floor, considering him with a strange expression. “Yeah, of course,” she said, “How’d you finish them so fast?”

“I just read right through them,” Adrian admitted, walking up to the checkout counter, while Jackie circled around it to meet him. “I’m only here to drive my sister around, so it’s not like I had anything else to do.”

“You are at a freaking convention, and you’re sitting around reading comic books? Nerd,” Jackie gave him a friendly, if extremely incredulous poke on the shoulder. Somehow, the teasing didn't seem as weird as it should have coming from a near stranger.

“ _I’m_ a nerd? _You_ work at a comic book _store!”_ Adrian said. 

“To-may-to, to-mah-to,” she said, waving it off, “Besides, everyone here is a nerd. That’s the point. So go out and be an active nerd.”

“Look, do you want me to buy your damn comics or not?” Adrian scowled at her, but there wasn’t any heat behind it. She smirked.

“Yeah, yeah. I need a raise anyway, nerd boy.” Jackie led him around the store again, picking up comic after comic from the past three years that she deemed top quality. As they walked, they got to talking, about anything: recent events in the superhero world, dealing with younger siblings, alternatives to being antisocial at a convention, etc… Adrian was surprised by how natural it all felt, and by the time they were through, a guilty part of him wished he could stay longer.

“You staying all three days?” she asked as they made their way back to the counter.

“Nah, just the one. It’s too expensive. Speaking of…” he pulled out his wallet and rifled through it, counting the bills, “Crap. I didn’t come expecting to buy anything.”

“How much you got?”

“Enough for…” he quickly did the math in his head, “Everything except for two. _Crap.”_

He looked up to meet Jackie’s stubborn gaze across the counter. She chewed at her lip, obviously contemplating his dilemma.

“I can put these—” he started to say, picking up a Batgirl and an Invaders trades to return to the shelf, but Jackie stopped him.

“No, you know what?” she said, “I like you. I’ll pay for them.”

“What?”

“Yep.”

“No, I can’t—”

“Too bad, I’m paying for them,” she had already pulled her own money out of her pocket, and snatched the twenty dollar bill from Adrian’s fingers, ignoring his loud protests.

“But—”

“Shush.”

She scribbled something on the receipt, stuck it in the back of the Invaders collection, and reached over the counter to stuff everything into Adrian’s bag.

“There,” she said, taking advantage of his stunned silence to give him a light shove toward the door, “No go enjoy the con, nerd boy!”

 

 

That evening, Adrian met up with Lucia and Julie near the café at the appointed time to leave. He spent more than a few seconds staring suspiciously at the same Deadpool cosplayer that had featured in Lucia’s text earlier (and another one, some hours later, where he did the Will-Smith-on-the-red-carpet pose with a surprisingly attractive, genderswapped slave Leia cosplayer), who appeared to have stuck with Julie and Lucia for most of the day. He waved at Adrian, and Adrian waved back, a little warily, while the girls exchanged goodbyes with him at the door.

“Who was that?” Adrian asked the moment they left the hotel.

“Deadpool,” Lucia replied, like it should have been obvious.

“Yeah, I could see that, but who _was_ he?”

“Deadpool.”

“Yeah, but… Never mind.”

Both girls had left the hotel heavily laden with merchandise. Besides the multiple plastic bags each girl carried, half a dozen rolled up posters threatened to burst out of Lucia’s quiver, and, in addition to the homemade batarangs, Julie’s pouches were stuffed with everything from Pokémon plushies to a light-up sonic screwdriver (Nine’s). About twenty new geek-themed buttons were pinned to the base of her cape. Lucia had a Bucky bear zipped up in the front of her jacket, while Julie clutched a matching Captain America bear in one hand, and in the other, she scrolled religiously through the convention’s Instagram tag on her phone.

“Hey, what’s this?” Lucia poked Adrian’s bag of comic books. Adrian squirmed out of her reach and glared at her.

“It’s nothing,” he insisted.

“Really? ‘Cause _I_ think it’s comics,” Lucia teased.

“No it’s not. Leave me alone,” Adrian said.

Lucia, of course, paid him no attention and lunged at the bag. He easily sidestepped her, but the next second, she started chasing him in circles around Julie, who kept walking down the sidewalk with her nose in her phone screen, either deliberately ignoring them or totally oblivious. Finally, overcoming the extra bulk of overpriced merchandise weighing her down, Lucia tackled Adrian and wrestled the bag away from him.

“Aha!” she shouted, poking her head inside, while Adrian made ineffective attempts to steal it back. “I knew it!”

“Shut up!”

“I _knew_ you still loved this stuff!”

“No I don’t. Shut up!” Adrian yelled again. The excuse he had made up to tell everyone popped into his head. “I only bought them ‘cause the cashier was hot.”

“Lies!” Lucia shouted, pointing an accusing finger at Adrian as she danced out of his reach, “You’re too stingy with money to waste any just to impress some guy.”

Adrian decided to let her pronoun error slide for now, and he yanked hard on her quiver strap. They both went sprawling on the sidewalk, scattering the contents of the bag all around them. Lucia leaped back to her feet immediately, ignoring all the people maneuvering around them who shot dirty looks. His face turning redder than the tomato Jackie had mentioned earlier, Adrian scrambled to pick everything up, while Lucia continued her gloating.

“See, _I_ _told you_ superheroes weren’t dumb kid stuff,” she shouted, “ _I told you!_ ”

Adrian shoved the Invaders book back in his bag, swearing when the receipt flew out of it.

“You can’t deny it; you secretly love superheroes. You were just pretending to hate them.”

As he snatched up the receipt, his eyes caught on what Jackie had scrawled under the total.

“ _I knew it, I knew it, IknewitIknewit!”_ Lucia jumped up and down, cackling.

Written on the receipt in small, spiky handwriting were the words, “text me when you’re finished,” and underneath them, a phone number.

Lucia fell silent upon seeing the look on Adrian’s face, and for a second nobody moved a muscle.

“Hey,” Julie said from ten feet further down the sidewalk, still staring at her phone, “Why do these people think you’re John Winchester?”

 

 

* * *

 

**One week, seven more comics, and sixty-eight texts later:**

 

“That fucking whore!” Chase complained, as he and Adrian waited to go up to bat, “How the fuck could she just break up with me like that?”

Adrian hummed vaguely in response, not paying attention to a word Chase had said all practice. Instead, he typed, “wait so ur saying vision is indirectly related to johnny storm???” into his phone and hit send.

“Dude, are you even listening to me?” Chase waved a hand in front of Adrian’s face.

“What? Yeah,” Adrian lied easily, racking his brains to remember what Chase was ranting about this time, “Amanda broke up with you. You’re pissed off.”

Chase squinted suspiciously at him, then glanced at the phone in his hand. “Who’re you texting?”

“No one,” Adrian said, a bit too quickly.

“Is it a girl?”

“...Yeah.”

“She hot?”

“Dude!”

“Well, is she?”

“…Yeah,” Adrian admitted.

“So are you two…?” Chase asked with a lecherous grin. He mimed the act with one hand and a finger.

Adrian had to forcibly stop himself from grinding his teeth together. “No.”

“You gonna?”

“No.”

“But you want to.”

“Dude, what the fuck is your problem?” Adrian snapped.

Chase threw up his hands in surrender, still grinning obnoxiously. “Fine, fine,” he said, “So who is she?”

“Just some girl I met,” Adrian muttered. He could feel his face turning red again. “She gave me her number. We've been texting.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

This time, Adrian really did grind his teeth. He didn’t answer.

“Hey, man, help me out here,” Chase said, “I wanna know where I can pick up some hot chicks.”

“Amanda _just_ broke up with you,” Adrian said, “A second ago, you were yelling about it.”

“Exactly. Where’d you meet her?”

Finally, Adrian grumbled, “Last week at my sister’s convention.” He turned his head to stare at the boy in front of him going up to bat, not daring himself to look at Chase’s face. For a few seconds, no one said anything besides the coach shouting at the pitcher.

“What, you bonded over how much you didn’t want to be there, right?” Chase said eventually, “Tell me that’s what happened. Or at least tell me she was in one of those slutty costumes.”

Something finally snapped in Adrian’s brain, and before he realized what was happening, he was shouting at Chase. “Actually, she was wearing a blue polo shirt, and she sold me a shit ton of comic books. Right this second, we're texting about possible influences of Professor Phineas Horton's World War Two-era technology on the creation of the Avenger known as the Vision.”

Chase glanced around to make sure the coach was out of earshot, before leaning close to Adrian and hissing, “What the fuck, man? I thought you got over that gay-ass shit years ago.”

“Fuck off,” Adrian spat, “I don’t give a crap about your shitty, disgusting opinions anymore, so quit trying to shove them down my fucking throat!” Before Chase could do more than stare in openmouthed shock, the coach shouted for Adrian to come to bat. He pushed himself off the bench, not sparing a second’s glance for Chase as he stormed up to the plate. At the last moment, he spun around. “Oh yeah,” he said, recalling to mind that slip of paper that had emerged out of Julie's cosplay-driven madness, “Your girlfriend broke up with you ‘cause you’re an arrogant, sanctimonious dickhead whose head is so far up your ass that the only friends you're capable of making are the bacteria living in your own colon.”

 _‘Gay-ass shit.’ God,_ he thought, _Why did I ever have a thing for him?_

**Author's Note:**

> Other cosplay pictures/text updates include: some guy with devil horns who looks like he transferred from the men in black, standing next to a lumpy sweater-clad man with a fake flaming sword. A little kid in a red bubble vest toddling along after his crazy-haired grandfather. And a guy in a pilot's uniform carrying a lemon.


End file.
